A Holistic Approach to Language Attitudes in Two Multilingual Educational Contexts

In line with the multilingual turn in language education, this chapter targets prospective teachers in two European multilingual contexts whose most common Dominant Language Constellation includes the local minority language, the State language and English as the primary foreign language learned at school. The two contexts under consideration are the Basque Autonomous Community (BAC) in Spain and Friuli Venezia Giulia (FVG) in Italy. We intend to look into one aspect of future teachers’ multilinguality in particular: their attitudes towards the majority language (Spanish in the BAC and Italian in FVG), the minority language (Basque and Friulian respectively) and the foreign language (English in both contexts). Quantitative data were collected via a questionnaire that was filled out by 553 participants from both settings. The aim of the study is twofold. First, attitudes towards the three languages in contact are examined to see if the significant differences observed between the two contexts when the traditional monolingual approach was used to measure attitudes persist once a holistic/multilingual approach is implemented. Second, the impact of relevant factors (e.g., gender, L1, or school type) on language attitudes is investigated from both a monolingual and a multilingual, holistic perspective.